Portside

Many state and federal efforts over the last 20 years have sought to reduce prison and jail populations, provide more rehabilitative programming inside, and address recidivism. Indeed, in North Carolina prisons, we’ve had a sense of hope for the future and the cautious belief that maybe mass incarceration has reached a significant turning point, one that recognizes our humanity and comes to the understanding that filling prisons with people in perpetual confinement is not the answer. 

Yet, many of us also knew the outcome of the election would potentially erase the last two decades of progress. The same conservative ideology that shaped America’s carceral state was biding its time through the Biden administration until it could build and fill even more prisons. With the election of Donald Trump, draconian approaches to crime and punishment found a new form that borrows from old ideas of totalitarian and fascist governments. 

That form is Project 2025, and it is a roadmap to carceral imperialism.

Reinforcing dehumanizing approaches

Published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, a collective of conservative groups that fund MAGA Republican campaigns, Project 2025 was created to be a policy framework for the next Republican administration. The manifesto lays out a plan that removes independent oversight from all levels of government and puts in place MAGA Republican loyalists committed to unquestioningly carrying out the president’s agenda. Though Project 2025 immediately alarmed many in the Democratic Party and the media—both of which tried to warn the public of the manifesto’s troubling goals—their efforts were largely drowned out by the massive amount of disinformation during the election cycle. On the campaign trail, Trump claimed to be unfamiliar with Project 2025. However, once in office, his appointees and executive orders told a different story. 

Project 2025 seems to inform the Trump administration’s decisions and much of its operation. This is evidenced by billionaire Elon Musk’s oversight of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency that is currently dismantling federal agencies without approval from Congress, engaging in unlawful federal employee buyouts, and purging agencies like the FBI.

When it comes to the criminal legal system, Project 2025 detaches from statistics, facts about crime and punishment, and evidence-based corrections—in other words, the application of social science to develop effective criminal justice policies. Instead, the doctrine reinforces punitive, dehumanizing approaches to crime proven to be ineffective and, in some cases, unconstitutional.

For example, Gene Hamilton, author of Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Justice (DOJ), relies on crime myths that are often used to manipulate beliefs about the causes of crime and the effect of certain responses to it. Hamilton is an attorney and co-founder of the far-right, Trump-aligned law firm America First Legal Foundation, which he leads with Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. 

Despite an overall decrease in serious violent crime in the U.S. over the last three decades, Project 2025 calls for incarcerating more people while also perpetuating the myth of rampant migrant crime. Indeed, the central messaging of the MAGA platform is that all immigrants are “illegal,” and therefore, their presence in the U.S. signals a crime wave. 

According to Hamilton, the DOJ focused too much on “imaginary, politically convenient threats” instead of investigating “elected officials and other public officers who conspired with outside allies to target and harass parents who were merely exercising their constitutional and statutory rights” under former Attorney General Merrick Garland. This is a reference to an October 2021 memo from Garland decrying the escalating threats of violence occurring at school board meetings in response to COVID-19 policies. While Hamilton makes it appear as if soccer moms were being denied the right to free speech, Garland’s concerns were aimed at the death and terroristic threats lobbed at school board members at the time. 

More broadly, Project 2025’s false claims about rampant crime tap into public fear and ignorance regarding actual crime statistics, which makes it easier to replace effective solutions and working policies with political agendas. Crime myths begin by condemning others, playing into prejudices toward a class of people, and then building esteem through policy comparisons. The rhetoric—racist, xenophobic lies cloaked in “America first” language—demonizes nonwhite, non-U.S. citizens to justify everything the government does to them, no matter how unconstitutional, brutal, or deadly. This is the bedrock of carceral imperialism.

Making totalitarianism more brutal

To reinforce the idea that all immigrants are criminals who “deserve” punishment, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will focus on the “public safety threats first,” but clarified that no undocumented immigrants are safe from deportation.

American otherism of immigrants is not new and neither is the intersection of immigration and the criminal legal system, nor the false morality of Christian nationalists who pursue cruel exclusionary policies under the guise of public safety. American history is threaded with such efforts. 

As one example, in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched America’s largest mass deportation. Named for a racist slur “Operation Wetback,” Border Patrol used military-style tactics to round up undocumented Mexican immigrants and Mexican American citizens without due process or notification to their families. Shoved into trucks and ships, they were then dumped in unfamiliar towns across the border, where many suffered and died of dehydration. A congressional investigation later described the conditions on ships to that of an “eighteenth century slave ship.” Though the government claimed 1.3 million were deported during the operation, historians believe the number was closer to 300,000.

Trump is well aware of this history. While campaigning, he referenced Eisenhower’s operation and told a crowd, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” 

The Clinton administration helped set the stage for Trump’s promised mass deportations. 

As Prism previously reported, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, known collectively as the 1996 laws, expanded the grounds of deportation to include misdemeanors; stripped judges of the ability to grant pardons on a case-by-case basis; allowed for prolonged and indefinite detention; and subjected asylum-seekers to fast-track deportations without ever seeing a judge. 

“Crimmigation”—a term coined by legal scholar Julie Stump to describe the intersection of criminal law and immigration law—expanded further when ICE established the Criminal Alien Program (CAP). Under CAP, ICE agents were empowered to carry out wide-scale immigration enforcement operations.

It is misleading to think Trump’s agenda is his own. Trump’s agenda is Project 2025, and if he changes anything, it is to make the totalitarian recommendations more brutal—especially when it comes to prosecuting the “war on terrorism.”

In the initial flurry of executive orders, Trump designated cartels and transnational gangs as “foreign terrorist organizations” and “global terrorists,” ordering their “total elimination” in the U.S. This opens the door to harshly punish and prosecute immigrants, U.S. citizens, and businesses alleged to have ties to these groups, allowing the government to virtually suspend the Constitution to prosecute, confine, and torture. The effects are already being felt. 

The Trump administration transferred dozens of migrants to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, alleging that they are dangerous, violent, or otherwise have criminal records and ties to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The administration has provided no evidence of these claims. Most of the migrants whose identities have become public do not have criminal records, and some were apprehended and detained for arbitrary reasons, such as tattoos. 

U.S. carceral imperialism does not stop at Guantánamo Bay. In defiance of a court order barring their removal under Trump’s invocation of the wartime declaration known as the Alien Enemies Act, the administration sent more than 200 Venezuelan migrants to a maximum security gang prison in El Salvador. The U.S. government will pay an annual fee for their incarceration, according to El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. 

Dismantling reforms

When Trump rescinded former President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14006, which ended DOJ contracts with private prison corporations, it paved the way for the mass incarceration of immigrants and revitalized the commercialization of confinement. GEO Group, one of the world’s largest private prison companies, just signed a 15-year, $1 billion contract with ICE. Executives with the company recently told investors in an earnings call to expect “unprecedented opportunities” under the Trump administration. 

For asylum-seekers and other migrants seeking safety in the U.S., criminalization should not be expected. Yet their very presence appears to justify abuse by xenophobes that voted into office a president without moral boundaries, ethics, or mercy. Who better to fulfill the fascist agenda of Project 2025? The same holds for any company or hedge fund equally willing to profit from human suffering to build more prisons. 

Within 24 hours of Trump’s reelection, the stock of GEO and CoreCivic, another leading private prison profiteer, soared. The Trump administration has fully embraced the private prison lobby and now allows these companies to contract with other federal agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service. 

In addition to delivering a resurgence in private prison profiteers, Project 2025 emphasizes the restoration of “law and order,” a euphemism for being tough on crime. This partly means taking legal action against local prosecutors who conservatives allege have been “too soft” on crime. 

To be clear, prosecutors are rarely ever soft on crime—except when it comes to white collar crime or crimes committed by law enforcement. What Hamilton and others frame as softness in the charging decisions of progressive prosecutors is actually a greater awareness that people from BIPOC communities are disproportionately given the harshest punishments and that extreme sentences have a limited effect on crime or recidivism. When it comes to plea bargains that occur in approximately 98% of all federal criminal cases, getting “tough” almost always means longer sentences. In Project 2025, Hamilton goes so far as to threaten legal action against district attorneys who—in an effort to address disparities—choose not prosecute certain crimes in their jurisdictions.

Project 2025 is inherently antidemocratic and punitive, and it disregards the humanity of marginalized people. As such, it calls for the restoration and expanded use of capital punishment. Trump supports this objective by way of an executive order aimed at restoring the death penalty—largely in response to the Biden administration’s decision to halt federal executions and commute the sentences of 37 people on death row. 

Trump’s executive order on the death penalty directs the attorney general to evaluate whether the 37 people whose sentences were commuted “can be charged with State capital crimes.” Additionally, it instructs the attorney general to “ensure that each state that allows capital punishment has a sufficient supply of drugs needed to carry out lethal injection” and encourages state attorneys general and district attorneys to pursue the death penalty for “all capital crimes.”

On the campaign trail, Trump floated the possibility of expanding the application of the death penalty for those convicted of drug and human trafficking and for migrants who kill U.S. citizens. The latter was included in Trump’s executive order on the death penalty, which received little public scrutiny. 

Repeating history

“Manifest destiny” guided the early days of the American government. This ideology posited that Americans were destined to extend the nation across the continent, and it was used as justification to carry out a genocide against Native Americans. During his inaugural speech in January, Trump invoked the phrase when discussing his goal of “taking back” the Panama Canal. 

“The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth … carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons,” Trump said. “And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars.”

Whether in the past or present, imperialism that is reframed in patriotic language does not make it less brutal to those who lose their land, liberty, and lives—or have their identities folded into American conquest. Evolving standards of decency helped civilize American society, and for a time, it seemed that we were making progress toward better understanding how race, gender, and class shape American life. But the last election tells the story of a country that is resisting the necessary exorcism of its wrongdoing, much like Germany after the Holocaust. In effect, evolving standards of decency simply exposed the big lie behind our country: that we are a society interested in liberty and justice for all. 

What is unique to the American electorate is that, headed into the 2024 election, Trump was a known quantity. There was a lot of misinformation, and voters were probably not connecting immigration with carceral expansion or the top-to-bottom purge of government with anything truly nefarious, like purposefully obliterating checks and balances. However, it is wrong to think Trump is the mastermind or that Project 2025 is a new manifesto. Neither is true. The acceleration of carceral imperialism is little more than a heavy swing of the pendulum in an unfortunate cycle we have yet to break. 

Indeed, the reelection of Trump draws from a tired period of history, repackaged under a red hat and sold as rabid patriotism for the ignorant. Project 2025 copies from a propaganda technique coined by Adolf Hilter in his political manifesto “Mein Kampf,” which states, “The great masses of the people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”

It would be fitting to include a trite point here about how those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But it seems we are proving the point just fine.

Lyle C. May is an Ohio University alum, member of the Alpha Sigma Lambda Honor Society, an incarcerated journalist, and author of the books Witness: An Insider's Narrative of the Carceral State (Haymarket Books, 2024), and The Transformative Journey of Higher Education in Prison: A Class of One (Routledge Academic Press, 2024).

When Prism was established in 2019, it was because we knew that the status quo media landscape wasn’t reflecting enough of the truth—and it wasn’t bringing us closer to our vision of collective liberation and justice. We saw a different path forward, one that we could forge by disrupting and dismantling toxic narratives, uncovering the hard truths of injustice alongside the people experiencing the acute impacts of injustice, and providing a platform for people of color to tell their own stories, and those of their communities.